The Most Important Facebook Insights for Career Pages (Part One)

July 22, 2013 4:26 pmPublished by Bill Boorman

When you are the administrator of a page, it is hard to know what they all really mean. It seems that Facebook provides plenty of data, graphs and charts, but what does it all mean to a recruiter running a career page? What should you be tracking, and what should cause the alarm bells to ring when the graph line starts heading downwards? I get asked this question quite a lot, and thought it was worth sharing my thoughts with the readers of the Work4 blog. Inspired by a post on the Agorapulse blog,* I have translated their findings, into the four most important insights you should be tracking and using to determine your career page strategy. In the next two posts I will be sharing where I think you should be looking and why.

1: Engagement

I have blogged before about how visibility is the new influence when it comes to Facebook, and visibility is hugely dependent on engagement because of Edgerank. Edgerank is the algorithm Facebook uses to determine who wants to see your updates, according to the history of your interaction with fans.

Engagement (or interaction), includes opening links, watching videos and the like. The only fans who see your updates are those who have liked, shared or commented on your updates in the past. This means that the more you can drive people to click or comment on your posts, the more likely it will be that those people will see your posts in the future.

Facebook Insights records the number of engaged users by post. This gives you a feel for what content your fans respond to and what content they are choosing to ignore. This is the barometer of how well you are engaging with your fans and whether you are staying relevant and topical to them.

When the ratio of engagement, or fans to interactions, is low, then your updates are just not hitting the mark, and it is time to think again. You should consider your fans to be your audience, rather than your candidates or applicants. Our research has shown that fans on Facebook follow brands for longer before applying, than how often they follow traditional career sites.

Engagement keeps the content visible and fans connected. You can view the engagement data by accessing the Insights page and viewing the engaged users column, which is listed by post.

Agorapulse recommends that the best way to measure how effective your engagement has been is to divide the engagement figure by the reached fans figure and multiply by 100. This gives you an understanding of the real effectiveness of your engagement, and because the volume of people who engage with you is fairly irrelevant if the majority of fans reached are choosing to ignore it, engaged content really is king.**

2: People Talking About This

You might have noticed the “People Talking About This” number listed at the top of any fan page you visit. This is taken each week, and it shows the volume of people who have liked, shared or commented on a post.

This is far more important than overall fan numbers, because it shows how many people have chosen to take direct action on a post. The “talking about” figure is based on the number of people who are reacting to your updates by liking, commenting or sharing, but does not include those who open links etc, as in the engaged figure.

This is important because it includes friends of fans reached by fan interaction, and demonstrates which updates drive interaction, and which ones don’t. A like, share or comment spreads the post to friends of the fan who reacted, offering a potential new audience. The introduction of Edgerank made the old practice of acquiring fans, or running competitions for likes, redundant in terms of value and effectiveness. The simple rule of the algorithm is that updates from pages are hidden from fans if they don’t react.

Where the early Facebook Career Sites were really notice boards for posting jobs, companies soon began to realize that this strategy would no longer work, as content got hidden from the fans eyes. New visitors to a page are much more likely to connect through the magic “like” button when they see a high number of posts “Talked About,” because this indicates the useful or relevant nature of updates, as well as whether the page is just a notice board or a true community.

Whilst people might view noticeboards, they join communities. You can find the “People Talking About This” data by visiting the Insights page and viewing the “People Talking About” column.

In the next post I’m going to look at the difference between fan reach and organic reach, and why these are important for your career pages. If you have any questions or comments on Facebook Insights, please leave them in comments.

Bill

*Agorapulse is one of the experts on page analytics.

**In the next post in this series I will be talking in more detail about how to find the data for extended reach.